Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
perfectibility of man were preached to Federalist congregations so
persuasively that instead of repudiating them and asserting the total
depravity of their neighbors, simple-minded merchants approved the
doctrines and cheerfully paid their pew-rent. It was a respectable
and bloodless revolution. Under its discreet disguise Unitarianism
accomplished for New England what Jeffersonianism had accomplished
for the South and West--the wide dissemination of eighteenth-century
French liberalism. It opened the New England mind to fresh ideas. Out
of Unitarianism was to come the intellectual renaissance, with its
transcendental philosophies and social reforms, its enlarged conception
of democracy and its Utopian dreams, which made New England count so
effectively in the developments of the half century.
The twenty-five years between 1790 and 1815 were the nascent period of
Unitarianism, when it was reëxamining the old Calvinist dogmas in the
light of the new liberalism, weighing the doctrines of election and
reprobation in the scale with the doctrines of God’s beneficence and
man’s excellence, and coming definitely to reject them as blasphemy
against God and defamation of human nature. And it was during these
critical years that the upholders of the traditional orthodoxy were
most actively concerned to provide a defense for the sacred dogmas
of their grandfathers. The liberal advance produced a conservative
reaction, and the lines of battle were sharply drawn. The capture of
Harvard College by the Unitarians in 1805, and the founding of Andover
Theological Seminary by the Calvinists in 1808, were dramatic events in
a long intellectual and legal struggle that aroused much bitterness and
bequeathed to the churches a rich legacy of unchristian animosities.
Good men on both sides--to recall a contemporary witticism--were quite
too ready “to fight for the glory of God as if the very devil were in
them.”
The traditional Calvinism defended itself with spirit, asserting so
vehemently that it was still a living faith, that the corpse was not
yet an authentic corpse, that it succeeded at least in postponing
its own burial. It was deeply entrenched in the inertia of custom,
but intellectually it was in really desperate straits. It was slowly
disintegrating from dry-rot with which both minister and theology were
stricken. With its major premises tacitly denied by Yankee experience,
it was unfortunate in being defended by as humorless and ungainly a
breed of theologians as ever quarreled over the loving-kindness of God.
Clinging to the defenses which Jonathan Edwards had erected against
the incursion of old-world ideas, it declaimed its dogmas and damned
the human race with tedious iteration. Over-threshed straw makes poor
fodder, and after a two-hour battle with potential infidelities, many a
good minister descended from his pulpit lamenting that his exhortations
had been wasted on “a sermon-proof, gospel-glutted generation.” Yet
he went faithfully back to his study to consume the day in argument
with a suppositious Arminian, and in spinning cobweb systems between
the worm-eaten rafters, quite oblivious to the common-sense world
without his walls. The difficulties in which those old Calvinists
found themselves very likely seemed tragic to them; but to later
generations, endowed with some saving grace of humor, the situation
was not without its spice. The good men were undeniably caught in
a distressing dilemma. They were laboring prodigiously both to sit
tight in the old dogma of determinism and yet wriggle out; to maintain
election and reprobation and yet insert somehow the thin edge of
personal responsibility; to prove to the satisfaction of the pew that
man is both bound and free. It was a hard necessity to be under, to
damn man by predestination, and “yet worry out enough freedom for him
to be decently damned on,” as a late critic has remarked;[440] to
send him to hell by divine decree, yet prove that he went of his own
accord. Yet they must do that impossible thing if they were to justify
their theology to common-sense congregations that were drifting into
indifference.
The whole thing was monstrously unreal and it resulted in hatching such
a brood of tenuous subtleties as we have difficulty in comprehending
today. Theological fame in Massachusetts came to be measured by the
skill with which the logician made out to stand on both sides of the
fence at the same time. Had it not been for Jonathan Edwards New
England Congregationalism would have drifted comfortably with the tide
of liberalism; but his uncompromising spirit held it anchored. This
masterly spinner of theological systems bequeathed to his successors an
unfinished work; but he had clearly envisaged the problem and suggested
a line of attack. In his great inquiry into the nature of will he had
hoped to provide an infallible means of reconciling the irreconcilable
by arguing that the will is dependent on desire. The natural man,
according to the Edwardean logic, is free to serve God as the highest
good if he desires, but he lacks the desire unless God reveals himself
as that highest good, and such revelation rests with God’s pleasure.
“Moral responsibility lies in the choice, not in the cause of the
choice.”[441] With this distinction suggested between natural and moral
freedom, Calvinistic speculation went on hopefully till it attained
its culminating triumph in Nathaniel Walker’s ingenious doctrine of
certainty with power to the contrary. Walker was a pupil of Timothy
Dwight’s, and one of the foundation professors of the new Yale Divinity
School, established to combat Unitarian heresies. A tremendous rattling
of the bones of the Connecticut churches followed his pronouncement
that man’s acts are not necessitated by a rigid law of cause and
effect, but that his choices are so connected with antecedent
conditions of soul and environment, that to God’s perception it is
certain what they will be, although he possesses full power of contrary
choice.[442]
As we contemplate those old theological abstractions, dead now as
Lot’s wife, the universe of our fathers shrinks to a petty compass,
not much larger than the snug little state of Connecticut, curiously
egocentric, curiously anthropomorphic. Obviously such grotesqueries
could not endure indefinitely. Presently there must appear the
common-sense housewife with her broom, and the dusty cobwebs would
disappear. English Arianism, emerging out of English Presbyterianism,
and long under suspicion of the New England fathers, first opened the
windows and let a little fresh air into the New England churches. But
back of Arianism was the total body of eighteenth-century rationalism,
with its theology rooted in new political and social philosophies,
and its doctrines derived from conceptions of God and man hostile to
Calvinistic determinism. There could be no reconciling them. Calvinism
must extirpate English rationalism or be disintegrated by it.
But rationalism refused to be extirpated. Here and there in
Massachusetts pulpits appeared a new order of preachers, young men
who had broken with the old dogmas and were plainly bitten with the
English distemper. Of these the most notable was Jonathan Mayhew, from
1747 to 1766 pastor of the West Church, and the freest-spoken minister
in Boston. Mayhew was a thoroughgoing liberal, not to say radical,
an intimate friend of Otis and John Adams, and chief clerical leader
of the opposition to the English ministry. He had broken through the
narrow parochialism of Boston; he corresponded with the intellectual
leaders of English dissent, and while still a young man was on the
highroad to Arianism. He seems to have been a brilliant fellow, bold
and frank in speech, with great and popular powers as a preacher, and
his early death alone prevented him from anticipating some of the work
of Channing.[443] A like fate abruptly terminated the work of another
able young man, Lemuel Briant, pastor of the Braintree church from
1745 to his death in 1753. Briant was John Adams’s pastor and, like
Mayhew, an Arian, with a ready wit that his adversaries must have
found disconcerting. “I have always tho’t,” he remarked apropos of
the familiar dilemma, “that so far as any Man is pure (let it be in a
greater or lesser Degree) he is not filthy.”[444] But the coming on of
the Revolutionary disputes and the disturbance of war put a stop to the
normal development of the movement; and the general reaction following
the treaty of peace gave encouragement to the Calvinistic reaction
and temporarily strengthened the Edwardean school. Nevertheless the
liberal doctrines of Mayhew and Briant, falling in with the French
philosophy, prepared the way for the conscious Unitarian revolt at the
end of the century.
That revolt was fundamentally ethical rather than theological, and
the name Unitarian, which the liberal movement accepted somewhat
reluctantly from its opponents, very inadequately describes its special
genius. The term derives from the middle eighteenth century, before
religious thought had come under the influence of the new social
philosophy; and it suggests a primary theological bias in a movement
that was far more significantly ethical and social. The early liberals,
forerunners of Unitarianism, were theologians given to probing in
rationalistic spirit, the mystery of the Godhood. Now, denial of the
Trinity has been common to all Unitarians, although individually they
might profess an Arian or a Socinian interpretation of the nature
and rôle of Jesus; but what is more important, they have been from
the first close Scripturists, disliking exact theological systems
and setting biblical authority above human. By the time the name had
come to be generally accepted--about the year 1815--it had already
lost much of its earlier significance, for emphasis had shifted from
the mystery of the Godhood to the problem of the relations existing
between the children and the Father. On the one hand supernaturalism
tended to disappear in morality, and on the other religion tended to
seek an authoritative basis in idealistic philosophy and justify itself
by intuitionism. “The soul,” argued Channing, in his exposition of a
later Unitarian theology, “is the spring of our knowledge of God.”
“Here is our primitive teacher and light.” “The only God, whom our
thoughts can rest on, and our hearts can cling to, is the God whose
image dwells in our own Souls” (_Works_, Vol. VI, Introductory Remarks,
p. 21). Unitarianism, in other words, reversed the thought process of
Calvinism. Instead of debasing man to a mean creature, subject to a
God of wrath, it professed to discover a loving Father in the human
heart of love. Here was a revolution indeed, a revolution in which
were the seeds of transcendentalism, of social Utopias, of pretty much
the entire intellectual awakening of New England. The old Calvinism
had no weapons to meet such an attack; the new creed lay outside its
realm of thought. What that creed finally came to be, under Channing’s
influence, is thus stated by a recent historian:
Man is God’s child, made in His image and object of His love; his
reason and conscience are divine witnesses to truth and light, and
when governed by them he walks in the ways of God, safe in his
Father’s love and care. The God in whom their opponents believed--a
God of election and reprobation, capable of dooming an entire
race because its ancestors disobeyed a God of arbitrary will and
discriminating grace--seemed to them simply an immoral being and
they frankly said so. (Fenn, _Religious History of New England,
etc._, p. 125.)
In its noblest expression Unitarianism became essentially a humanistic
religion, rational, ethical, individual, yet with deep and warm